For many, insomnia was a symptom of pandemic quarantines. For Craig Armstrong, an award-winning orchestral, electronic and film composer and musician, long sleepless nights led him to walk around his neighborhood in Glasgow where he faced an eerie loneliness punctuated by the sound of ambulances rushing to hospitals.
Nights like this led him to his home studio, where he stayed until dawn composing pieces that would eventually become his latest album. Nocturnes: Music For Two Pianos (Nocturne: Music for two pianos).
“I regularly spent time in the studio around 1, 2 or 3 in the morning; I was just starting to compose on the piano," Armstrong tells BBC Kultura.
"I think I was motivated to distract from the nightmare around us.
"It was a very dark time for a lot of people - I know a lot of people who had a terrible time, so I wanted to see some light at the end of the tunnel."
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Armstrong's Nocturne consists of 14 intimate tracks and they may seem a bit simplistic compared to the music from his otherwise very extensive catalog.
It contains several albums with music for films such as Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, then the music for the biography of Ray Charles or the collaboration with the band Massive Atek for the Royal Shakespeare Troupe.
All of them are very emotional and absorbing.
They also renew the deeply rooted and creatively fluid tradition of nocturne, or night music.
The influential Irish composer/pianist/teacher John Field published the first precisely named nocturne in 1814.
This form (music created to be performed after 11 p.m.) is also observed in the works of artists such as Frédéric Chopin (who published 18 nocturnes between 1832 and 1846, while three were published posthumously in 1849) and Claude Debussy (whose Three Nocturnes, published in 1900, was inspired by the symbolist poetry of the French poet Henri de Rainier).
There are also composers from the 20th century such as Eric Satti, Benjamin Britten and many others.
"The very idea of calling this album Nocturne was very practical; all the tracks were written in the middle of the night," Armstrong laughs.
"The nocturne form is not given. For many musicians, in my opinion, it was very free - it didn't have any mortgage that would make it music that sends some big messages.
"They are short vignettes that reflect the moment. It is a concise and emotional musical space".
Armstrong's Nocturne are quite short tracks, between one and five minutes, but that's why they are sincere and full of hope.
He personally plays both piano pieces, because the quarantine prevented the presence of other musicians ("With two pianos, I got a very tangible sound; you almost don't know when and what he is playing, the sound is almost ambient").
Nocturnal moods are more reflective than linear.
Nocturne No. 11 is a tribute to the much-loved Japanese artist Ryuichi Sakamoto and his seemingly simple (but also complicated and multi-layered) compositional style.
Nocturne No. 12 inspired by a music box that once belonged to Armstrong's grandmother.
"I guess it's always a question of how we perceive time in different parts of the day," says Armstrong.
"During the night the sounds are different than during the day and the senses are probably heightened."
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Blurred lines
Creative boundaries are probably the most blurred after dark.
Night music is clearly not reserved for the western expanses; jazz standards are drenched in sleepy atmospheres (such as Round Midnight, Thelonious Monk's 1944 bebop classic).
Awake late at night, sometimes we feel drawn to gaiety or affection (perhaps even both); Indian classical music has spiritual chants (ragas) associated with different parts of the day (or different seasons).
In the September 2016 India edition of The Times magazine, classical singer Pandit Jasraj describes the mesmerizing malkunas (meditative chants) of Hindustan as a form “sung in the wee hours, after midnight. The effects of that raga are soothing and intoxicating."
A collection of essays Nocturne: popular music and the night, explores the world's multi-genre night music scene, from London to Berlin, Tokyo and Yogyakarta, and places this music in the late hours of the night, when it transforms from background noise to impact.
The editors of this collection, Giacomo Botha and Jeff Stahl say:
"Music enlivens the night and depicts it, but also contributes to its tempo, stimulating movements in nightclubs, bars and concert halls and giving cities a nighttime charge and social force".
"It nourishes and intensifies the intensity of the night, fences itself off from various social energies, and all this only reinforces the boundary between dynamic nights and days spent in chairs".
When I was a child, I felt like the night could be some otherworldly playground (although I was also afraid of the dark).
In my late teens, staying up late into the night was a rite of passage, whether I spent the night clubbing or chasing essay deadlines.
Night music seems to always sharpen the senses and not only on the dance floor, but also much further - it was the soundtrack for those nebulous hours in which time flows from one date to another.
Many contemporary songs manage to evoke that sleepless atmosphere, regardless of whether it's a club hit Insomnia the Faithless line-up from 1995, all with the chorus,,I Can't Get No Sleep" (I can't sleep), a glorious rave-pop hit3 AM KLF's Eternal from 1991, or about the famous Chicago house trackAnd Fear the Night (I'm Afraid of the Night) by Tyree Cooper.
Enigmatic producer Kapinynas also collected his nocturnal moods in a self-titled 2006 album, such as the elegiac track Night Bus (Night bus).
This year, British author Puma Blue (Jacob Allen) explored his personal long-term struggle with insomnia on an excellent debut album. In Praise of Shadows.
His expression sounds elegant and raw at the same time, especially on the stunning electro-soul track Opiate ("I sleep much longer than before... Thank the angels that follow me/Still in the grave, still scared/I must be losing my mind").
One of the most amazing concerts I attended was a continuous eight-hour (from 11 at night to seven in the morning) performance of the lullaby Better sleep (2015) to an audience lying in sleeping bags.
I remember dozing sporadically during this eight-hour concert, and every time I woke up I felt calmed by the presence of the musicians and lulled anew by the sounds.
Soporific bass rhythms that seemed to come from the womb and "musical dawns" that slightly accelerated and intensified the music.
Richter created this piece in collaboration with neuroscientist David Eagleman, and was inspired by classical works such as Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations from 1741, which was commissioned by a Russian diplomat due to insomnia.
The Goldberg Variations were performed by new piano star Pavel Kolesnikov at this year's BBC celebration.
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When I interviewed Richter, he explained everything:
"The piece comes from my personal feelings. I have become very tired of the increased virtualization of our lives; we are constantly on a screen, which means that we are forced to constantly be ready for it".
"I wanted to make something that would work as an antidote to that feeling and to extract something basic human from the technological phase of existence.
"I've always thought that sleep is a big reservoir in which we can connect with something bigger than ourselves - so I wanted to encourage that, but also to make a political step off this conveyor belt."
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"One of the starting points with the piece Sleep was very direct; when our children were small, I would often go and play concerts that would later be broadcast on the radio, and Julia (Julia Mar, Richter's wife) would listen to it in another time zone, usually in the middle of the night.
"We started thinking about that border zone, when you are in front of the dream itself, as a space where music happens. Performance of the piece Better sleep is something like an extreme sport," he adds.
"I have hundreds of pages written with piano music and it's a real physical challenge. I always have to jet lag myself, so that my performance is like it's early in the morning".
Another great talent of this era who got inspiration from sleepless nights is the composer and musician Anna Meredith.
Her wonderful and touching work on the album Four Tributes to 4AM from 2011 is based on recordings of night music made in the vicinity of Darbi.
"Somewhere I read that depressing statistic that most people die at 4 in the morning. More than at any other time," says Meredith.
“I've always considered 4 a.m. to be 'nobody's time'; 3 in the morning sounds like a good time from last night, while 5 in the morning is more like an early start for the next day, so you don't really know what plan 4 in the morning fits into in terms of yesterday or tomorrow."
"I had the idea to do some kind of mini-portraits of different parts of the city at 4 in the morning.
"My sister Elenor and I spent the whole night around the main city road with recording devices - we went to houses, clubs before they closed, parks, we went to the highway in order to record the cars passing by, we also went a little out of town to malls that were completely deserted, except for security.
"I remember how we deliberately slowed down the tempo to create that heavy, uneasy atmosphere, before the gradual awakening in the last movement of the composition.
"When you're awake in that 'magical moment' and everyone else is so vulnerable while they're asleep, you feel like you've stumbled upon a secret."
That sense of uncovering secrets and breaking the rules is also something that makes night music so powerful; we can't sleep, but we're also hypersensitive.
And just as Armstrong records it in the nocturnes, there is always a feeling of breaking through the darkness, into some new light.
You may also be interested in this video: Why we have nightmares and why they are good for us
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